Touch7 Photo ECG™

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Minimum system requirements

Mac or PC running Adobe Photoshop CC or higher
LAB Settings for the RIP/DFE

T7-Orange
L: 70 A: 47 B: 79

T7-Green
L: 63 A: -73 B: 36

T7-Violet
L: 19 A: 55 B: -70

T7-Red
L: 58 A: 72 B: 62

T7-Blue
L: 33 A: 18 B: -68
Using your own ECG inks

If your printing device has it’s own extended gamut inks, all you need to do is print the Touch7 spot colour with the corresponding ink on your press – For example, T7-Orange would be printed with the orange ink on your printing device.
Recommended inks for analogue printing

You can use your own preferred inks, however, if you wish to print using inks recommended by Touch7, we recommend the following inks:

T7-Orange
Pantone® 151

T7-Green
Pantone® 7481

T7-Violet
Pantone® Violet

T7-Red
Pantone® Bright Red

T7-Blue
Pantone® 2728

PANTONE® is the property of Pantone LLC. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © Pantone LLC, 2017. All rights reserved.

For more information on ink density, ink printing sequence on press, or for our most frequently asked questions, please visit our FAQ section
Installation guidelines for Adobe Photoshop® CC

Step 1
Download and install Anastasiy’s Extension Manager from: install.anastasiy.com

Step 2
Download the Touch7 Photo ECG™ plugin: www.touch7.co/touch7demo

Step 3
Open Anastasiy’s Extension Manager and drag the Touch7 Photo ECG.zxp file onto the PHOTOSHOP product:

Step 4
Quit and Restart Photoshop. Your plugin should now be available from:
Window > Extensions (Legacy) > Touch7 Photo ECG™
Activating your Touch7 Photo ECG™ plug-in

The Touch7 Photo ECG™ plug-in will work as a free 7 Day trial. At any stage of the trial period, you may enter a valid license code to unlock the full Touch7 plug-in.

❶
Type your email address and press the “Click to Send” button to start the Activation Process
❷
Type in your Activation Code (Your Activation Code was sent to the email address you used in Step 1) Press the “Click to Send” button to Activate the plug-in. The plug-in will now work in demo mode for 7 days.
❸
If you have purchased a license code type it in here and press the “Click to Send” button to unlock the full Touch7 Photo plug-in. Your plug-in will now work for the duration of your license.
❹
Click to purchase a license code

If you have any problems registering your Touch7 Photo ECG plug-in, please contact us for assistance at support@touch7.co
An overview of the Touch7 preset buttons

Touch7 gives you the ability to selectively enhance your images. Simply choose which spot colour(s) you would like to create, by clicking the appropriate coloured button.

❶
Create One Spot Colour
❷
Create Two Spot Colours
❸
Create Three Spot Colours
Converting an image

To create your ECG separations, simply click on the appropriate coloured buttons.
Assign your ECG spot channel to the correct press manufacturers ink set

Watch our tutorial video if you need help on how to assign ink values to your spot channels.

Double click your Touch7 ECG spot channel. In this example we are using the Orange channel.

The Spot Channel Options window will open – Click on the Color box

The Color Picker window will open.

Note: If your window opens up showing a color library, such as Pantone, please click the "PICKER" button to bring you back to the Color Picker window.

Go to the Touch7 Swatch Palette and click on your specific press partner ink. In this example we are going to use the swissQprinter Orange. When you click on this ink color it will assign the LAB value for that specific ink to the spot channel in your design.

Note: If you have not installed the Touch7 Swatch Palette, please download it from here and load it into your Swatch window

To import the swatch palette. Open Swatches from the menu (Window > Swatches). When the swatches window is open, go the burger menu in the top right (3 lines icon) and go down to Import Swatches

Click OK in the Color Picker window

Click OK in the Spot Channel Options

You have now assigned the specific press partner ink values to your spot channel.

TIP: You can create an action set of the above process to speed up your workflow.
SCR (Source Colour Removal)

SCR is a little bit like UCR, but whereas UCR restricts the amount of ink printed in the shadows, SCR is used to remove the equivalent hue value of the Touch7 spot colours from the original source image – this feature is particularly useful when you wish to extract out a range of colour from your image, that you wish to be swapped out for the ECG ink on your press.

Unlike using the PRESETS buttons which adds a spot colour to enhance the colour saturation of your image, the SCR feature is designed to subtract the ECG spot colour value from your image so that you use less ink in the CMYK areas when printing with the ECG ink.
SCR can be applied to individual Touch7 spot colours, giving you freedom to control how your design is printed
Note: The latest plugin update (v1.2 or higher) will convert CMYK images into RGB to perform the best SCR image separation – you can convert the RGB back into CMYK without any data loss.
SCR (Advanced Features)

How to process an image using the SCR buttons.

Step 1:
Open your image and choose which ECG separations to create. In this instance we will create a GREEN and ORANGE separation.

Step 2:
Using “LEVELS” in Photoshop, set your shadow point to push more colour into the ECG separation (if desired) – The SCR feature will subtract this spot colour from your source image.

Step 3:
Make sure you are on your CMYK/RGB channel, then press the SCR buttons.

BEFORE using the SCR feature

The image to the left has the GREEN and ORANGE separations shown on top of the original CMYK image – if this image was printed as it is, the GREEN and ORANGE will overprint – adding extra colour saturation to the printed image.

AFTER using the SCR feature

The image shown to the left is without the GREEN and ORANGE separation, to show you how the original source image has had the colour removed from where the green and orange inks will print.

Final Image

The green and orange inks will now increasing the vibrancy of the image.
Working with RGB or CMYK images

Whenever possible we advise working with original RGB images, as these images have a larger colour gamut and therefore have more data to extract out – Images that have been converted to CMYK have a reduced colour gamut and therefore there’s less colour information to extract out!

Also, just because an image says it’s RGB, doesn’t mean that it has always been an RGB image...Sometimes people convert CMYK images to RGB, but this still retains the same reduced colour space of the original CMYK image – Therefore, it’s a good working procedure to edit your spot separations after they have been extracted, to ensure you are getting the best out of your images.

In the image above we are going to extract out ORANGE, GREEN and BLUE spot separations, using the Orange, Green and Blue buttons on the Touch7 Plug-in. However, because this image is in CMYK, some of the colour information will have been clipped/reduced - this is because CMYK has a smaller colour space compared to RGB, so when an image is converted to a smaller colour space, it loses some of that colour saturation. Touch7 can be used to add more colour back in to your image.

The image above shows the standard image separations that were created using the preset buttons on a CMYK image

The image above shows how using “LEVELS” in Photoshop, you can add more colour to your ECG separations.

The Touch7 plug-in can only extract out colour information that is in the image. If your image has very little ECG colour data, you can add more colour into your design by using LEVELS in Photoshop. We would advise to increase the amount of colour in your separations by controlling the shadow point on the histogram, as shown in the image above. When you are happy with your separations, click on OK.
Working with images in PDF files

Touch7 can be used to process images within a customer supplied PDF – However, due to the limitations of Adobe Acrobat it’s only possible to process one image at a time.

Step 1
Open your PDF file using Adobe Acrobat (requires a full version of Adobe Acrobat Pro/DC)

Step 2
Using the Adobe Acrobat Tools, select the “EDIT PDF” function.

Step 3
Select the image you wish to convert and go to the “EDIT USING” feature, and select your version of Adobe Photoshop – If you do not see a version of Adobe Photoshop listed, navigate to your preferred Photoshop application, using the “Open with...” option.

Step 4
Your image will then open up in Photoshop – Next, process the image using Touch7 Photo ECG, and once you are happy with your file conversion, save and close the image.

Step 5
Next, go back to your PDF in Adobe Acrobat and your image will automatically update, bringing in the extra Touch7 spot colours.
Deleting history snapshots

When the Touch7 plug-in processes an image, it needs to create “History snapshots” at various stages of the file conversion. Once you have processed an image, if you wish to undo what you have done and try a different Touch7 preset button, you would first need to delete the previous history snapshots.

Note: If you do not delete the previous History Snapshots, the Touch7 preset buttons will be locked, ensuring that you do not accidentally delete your existing separations.